How to draw KOALA

Greetings and welcome to this final day of Summer 2023 in the northern hemisphere and the end of winter for our friends in the southern hemisphere. Tomorrow is the first day of Autumn/Fall (or Spring!), and for many of us a very favorite season. Just 95 days to Christmas if you’re counting!!

We have a very fun tangle to explore this weekend, it’s Koala from Spanish CZT Tomàs Padrós. Tomàs has a lot of fun and quirky tangles on the site, to that list we add his 28th, Koala.

Tomàs introduces Koala and shares a host of ways to have fun with it:

I created this pattern in 2021 but I have never shown it. The design arose from wanting to capture the idea of something clinging to a more or less cylindrical surface. I immediately thought of a Koala, with its arms and legs clinging to the trunk of a tree. These four limbs show the four possible positions in which the basic motif can be arranged on either side of two auras.

From here I propose three deconstructions. The simplest one arranges the basic shapes in the same position and on one side only.

Update a day or two later: I was not particularly happy with my first efforts at Koala (on right) so I’ve played with it more and one of these further explorations is more in the spirit of the playfulness of Tomàs’s Koala meta-patterns so I’ve replaced my original example.

Tomàs illustrates the first and simplest set of step-by-step instructions for drawing the basic Koala below including a sweet caricature of his inspiration:

Image copyright the artist and used with permission, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. These images are for your personal offline reference only. Please feel free to refer to the images to recreate this tangle in your personal Zentangles and ZIAs. However the artist and TanglePatterns.com reserve all rights to the images and they must not be publicly pinned, altered, reproduced or republished. (Small side note: if you look at the legalese in Pinterest, you are legally responsible for obtaining permission to post every photo that gets ‘Pinned’. Giving credit or sharing the source link doesn’t count.) Thank you for respecting these rights. “We must all face the choice between what is right and what is easy.” ~ Albus Dumbledore

Another more elaborate deconstruction (Koala Medium, below) shows two opposite and alternating positions. The third deconstruction (Koala Plus) is the most complex. In it you can combine any of the four positions on both sides of the auras that you must imagine, although one of the auras could coincide with the string of a tile. Combining these shapes in pairs or quartets generates attractive mega-patterns with link suggestions.

In addition to some tips I also show some example drawings. In the Renaissance bijou I assume the inevitable association of ideas with the snail (although in my arrangement it looks more like peeled prawns from a Chinese restaurant). I have to say that these are not snails, and that there is nothing more abstract than the shell of a snail, since it is a simple spiral.

In the gray bijou I show a very decorated mega-pattern. This is a lot of fun and full of possibilities.

The third bijou (below) plays with tentacular suggestions or sea serpents with incrustations or excrescences.

The fourth bijou shows Koala in various arrangements. In one of them Koala dresses up as Mooka. It was a lot of fun playing with that hybridization.

The final mosaic develops two ornamental ribbons that play with mega-patterns that add interior and exterior auras. They are accompanied by Punzel, Sez, Tagh, Tidal and Rambles.

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Check out the tag tomasp for more of Tomàs’s tangles on TanglePatterns.com.

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I look forward to seeing what you've created.

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4. How to use the site — an excellent free video tutorial showing how to use the site as well as pointing out lots of useful features you might have missed.
5. Linda's List of Zentangle-Original Patterns — here is the complete list of original tangles (aka "official tangles") created and introduced by founders Rick Roberts and Maria Thomas, including those not published online. If you are new to the Zentangle Method I highly recommend learning a few of the published Zentangle classics first.
6. What Makes a Zentangle tangle? A Zentangle has no up or down and is not a picture of something, so you have no worries about whether you can draw a hand, or a duck. You always succeed in creating a Zentangle. Patterns that are drawings of a recognizable naturalistic or actual object, figure, or scene, are not tangles, and tangles never start with pencil planning.
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